Do your ‘beach work’ and to hell with what the gurus say

Posted on March 13, 2008. Filed under: Strength Training | Tags: body composition, bodybuilding, exercise, fat loss, performance, weight loss, weight training |

My buddy Reza and I are starting to have more frequent discussions about fitness, training, diet and health. A recent topic got me thinking about what it takes to keep someone on a fitness program. Naturally, I analyzed my own decline (which I am thankfully turning around quite nicely) and uncovered something very strange, which I’ll tell you about below.

First, something that I have noticed. Most ‘high-profile’ strength and conditioning professionals neglect or even dismiss a very important thing about the average person who exercises:

Many of us who work out do so to LOOK better, whether we’re conscious of that or not

Even professional athletes who are genuinely training for performance and train hard and often, while eating very clean, end up looking very good. And you can be sure that looking good makes them feel good. Why else do many athletes (OK, the males) at the Olympics rip off their tops and ’strike a pose’ when they’re victorious? Haha!

But what about the average person?

I have found that for most people, myself included, even when good health and longevity are the primary motivators, the promise of looking fit is what keeps the motivation up. As strange as that sounds, its true more often than not.

A very simple: “Wow! What did you do to lose so much weight?” or “You’re pecs have really improved a lot!” from someone that hasn’t seen you in a while can be much more motivating than a doctor telling you that your blood pressure had dropped 5 points.

Who cares if its ‘messed up’? And who is anyone to judge anyway? We’re human. Lets just work with it! I think that for the average person, doing entire workouts of isolation work or adding such exercises to existing routines should not be neglected and should even be emphasized.

My personal experience

20 years ago, I was a skinny 16-year old starting my final year of high-school – 70kg at 1.8m tall. That’s when I became interested in weight training. That interest very quickly turned into obsession, and by the time I finished my undergraduate degree in biology, I weighed a hard, lean 95kg! Not bad – 25kg of pure muscle in four years. And I was much, much fitter – surfing, my other obsession kept the strength/general fitness/health balance right on target.

I kept progressing and by the time I finished my M.Sc. in 1996, I weighed 105kg – also got married at the end of that year. At that point, I was walking notebook of ways to build muscle and get fit – my science training was a great bullshit-o-meter.

Soon after, I traded surfing for a new obsession – martial arts – eventually finding mixed martial arts. I loved the submission wrestling component, and totally immersed myself in it, I even went so far as to travel to the US to learn catch-as-catch-can. Eventually, I became proficient enough to win gold in the heavyweight and open divisions in the top grappling competition in our province.

That was a turning point. I became obsessed with ‘functional’ training to further improve my strength for grappling. I convinced myself that I needed to drop all the ‘narcissistic’ beach work. While doing that didn’t change the way I looked, I didn’t enjoy my gym work as much anymore. By the time I finished my PhD, I lost my drive for gym training, and started going less and less. I know why now:

A tiny bit of narcissism can be a great cure for laziness and/or lack of motivation

Just the thought that an isolation exercise will make my body look more ‘finished’ is actually a nice incentive to do a workout in the first place. Regardless of whether it does that or not (and it actually does).

My recommendations:

do your ‘beach work’ if it makes you feel happy – lateral raises, chest flyes, machine curls, tricep kickbacks, etc. it doesn’t matter. Just do it. But…
‘earn’ your beach work – pick one or two compound exercises, hit them hard first in your routine, and then reward yourself with the isolation exercises
alternatively, have ‘body shaping’ days on days that you would normally take off
- just keep them short
- remove any isolation work from other days to shorten those ‘main’ workouts
reassure yourself that isolation work is NOT useless
- hitting the little muscle groups can prevent injury and improve performance
- strongman competitors do them, because it gives them an edge
do isolation exercises with a good amount of intensity and you will get that ‘beach look’, while getting the physical benefits too